“I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” which scored for Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield “Anyone Who Ever Had a Heart” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” both hits for Warwick “Make It Easy on Yourself,” which rode the charts for Warwick, Jerry Butler, and the Walker Brothers and “My Little Red Book,” which led off Love’s essential eponymous debut LP. Dominating the remaining two discs is superlative live material, most featuring Costello’s vocals and keyboard accompaniment by either Bacharach or Steve Nieve.Īmong the tracks in the box are concert renditions of Bacharach/David classics that mark Costello as arguably the best of their interpreters. The first of the box’s CDs delivers a remastered copy of Painted from Memory, Bacharach and Costello’s excellent 1998 album, which features the Grammy-winning “I Still Have That Other Girl.” The second disc includes versions of songs from a proposed stage score performed by Costello or Bacharach as well as by such artists as Jenni Muldaur and Bill Frisell. A pair of included vinyl LPs duplicates some of its material and the set comes with two 20-page booklets, one containing lyrics and song credits and the other featuring a new 10,000-word essay by Costello. The anthology offers four CDs with a total playing time of three hours. The new Songs of Bacharach & Costello, which features 19 previously unreleased tunes and three recently recorded numbers, collects all their collaborations and offers abundant evidence of how well they worked together. And doesn’t the latter’s “Alison” sound like something Bacharach and David could have written? (OK, maybe not the line about the protagonist’s friend taking off her party dress.) Bacharach even played piano on Manfred Mann’s version of “My Little Red Book,” a song he wrote with David that arguably issues from the same musical universe as some of Costello’s early work. However, his music has proven a good fit over the years for artists ranging from the rock group Love and jazz musician Stan Getz to R&B singer Ron Isley of the Isley Brothers. Bacharach, who died February 8 at age 94, was best known for the pop and easy-listening versions of his compositions. Take a close look at Bacharach and Costello’s bios and listen to their work, however, and you’ll begin to see why their collaboration made sense and bore fruit.Ĭostello-whose catalog embraces elements of genres as varied as new wave rock, country, pop, and classical-grew up listening to Bacharach/David songs and performed their “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” as far back as 1977. That pairing may at first seem as unlikely as the one between Robert Plant and Alison Krause or the Christmas medley recorded by Bing Crosby and David Bowie. The great songwriter Burt Bacharach, who teamed up most famously with lyricist Hal David, also worked for nearly three decades with Elvis Costello.
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